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International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group
June 4, 2021
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Robert J. Currie: Canada should suspend its extradition treaty with France over the persecution of Hassan Diab
rabble.ca 03/06/2020 - The prime minister recently claimed that Canada was "standing up" for Diab, as it would for other citizens targeted for unfair prosecution by foreign states; but it is not clear what is being done, and in any event, it appears it is not working.

It is time that the government of Canada took both diplomatic and legal steps to push back against France's unfair and unlawful pursuit of a Canadian citizen. Such steps would be unusual and would have to be cautiously applied, since governments do not lightly interfere with how foreign states administer their criminal law, particularly when those foreign states are historical allies like France. But this is an unusual case, and there are international law considerations that Canada can bring into play, if it has the political will to protect its citizen.

France is arguably in breach of the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), under which it is obliged both to ensure fair criminal investigation and trial procedures, and to send people to trial within a reasonable time. These are obligations owed to Canada, which is also a party to the treaty, and neither seems to have been complied with here. Also, the court of cassation's decision may clear the way for a renewed extradition request by France for Diab. In the circumstances of this case, such a request might very well violate the Canada-France extradition treaty itself, which is underpinned by an obligation to undertake extradition only in good faith.

The Diab case is not the only legal issue that taints Canada's extradition relationship with France. Inuit leaders in Nunavut have argued that Canada has let them down by discontinuing a case against Father Johannes Rivoire, a French citizen who fled to France after allegedly sexually assaulting four children. Canadian charges against Rivoire were quietly dropped in 2017; when questioned, Justice Canada refused to say whether it had sought extradition, nor is there any evidence that Canada has ever even asked France to prosecute Rivoire. [...]

France is also known for having significant problems with its criminal justice system. It has long been the subject of criticism for lengthy trial delays and excessive pre-trial detention, as well as barriers to accused people being able to access a lawyer. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that France's prison conditions amount to inhuman and degrading treatment. Hassan Diab himself experienced all of these human rights breaches in one way or another. It is troubling that Canada continues to extradite people to France with such enthusiasm.

In 2020, when China brought in a new security law that threatened to erode human rights protections in Hong Kong, Canada suspended the Canada-Hong Kong extradition treaty. This was primarily a gesture of diplomatic displeasure, but also served to highlight Canada's concerns about human rights. Such a measure would fit very well in this case. On the diplomatic side, it would signal that Canada will no longer tolerate -- as it should not -- France's unlawful and immoral treatment of Diab. Read more - Lire plus





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We’re taking the RCMP to court
Ricochet 26/05/2020 - Every day is a new day with new excuses from the RCMP about why access is limited,” says Brent Jolly, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists. “Enough is enough.” A coalition of media outlets and press freedom groups is filing an application in B.C. Supreme Court today, asking a judge to order the RCMP to provide journalists with reasonable access to police enforcement actions taking place in southwest Vancouver Island near Port Renfrew, B.C.

Parties to the application include the Canadian Association of Journalists, Ricochet Media, Capital Daily Victoria, The Narwhal, Canada’s National Observer, APTN, The Discourse, IndigiNews and Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. This unprecedented collective action on behalf of the Canadian news industry is the culmination of eight years of the national police force using the same playbook to frustrate and restrict media access to enforcement actions in isolated areas.

The Justin Brake precedent at the Newfoundland and Labrador Court of Appeal established that journalists could not be considered in violation of an injunction when they go into an injunction zone to report on issues of public interest, and police cannot use injunctions as an excuse to restrict media access. A report of the RCMP’s own oversight body, the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission, arrived at a similar conclusion, finding that the use of broad exclusion zones was outside the authority of the RCMP and raising concerns over their use to interfere with working journalists.

Over the past week of RCMP activities on Vancouver Island, where police are enforcing a court injunction against protesters blockading logging roads to protect old-growth forests, journalists have been refused access at police checkpoints dozens of times. When they have gained access, after repeated attempts and legal threats, they have been detained and held up to 150 feet away from arrests (over 60 arrests have taken place to date) and chaperoned at all times by RCMP minders, compromising their ability to freely collect information and conduct private interviews. The RCMP have even gone so far as to hold up tarps to obstruct journalists’ view of arrests, and tell journalists they can’t go to the bathroom without permission and an accompanying officer.

“The RCMP have been using broad exclusion zones to interfere with members of the media for at least eight years, across multiple provinces,” said Ethan Cox, an editor with Ricochet Media. “Legal precedent and the RCMP’s own oversight body say doing so is beyond the authority of the force, but it keeps happening. What’s at stake here is nothing less than the public’s right to know.” Read more - Lire plus

Kodao 22/05/2021 - Canadian parliamentarians called on the Philippines government to stop its officials from harassing and threatening the lives of human rights defenders. In a statement, the Canadian House of Commons Subcommittee on International Human Rights said it is appalled that Karapatan secretary general Cristina Palabay was harassed and threatened by a top intelligence official after appearing as a resource person in its hearing earlier this month.

“After sharing her traumatic experiences defending human rights in the Philippines, Cristina Palabay’s life was threatened by agents of the Philippines government as a direct result of her appearance before the Subcommittee,” it said from Ottawa.
“The Subcommittee is appalled by the situation Ms. Palabay finds herself in,” the Subcommittee added. Palabay and Rappler executive editor Maria Ressa narrated human rights abuses by the Rodrigo Duterte government in a hearing conducted by the Subcommittee last May 4. The Canadian parliamentarians said Palabay’s “brave” testimony described the crumbling state of human rights in the Philippines, for which is continuously being persecuted. Immediately after, National Intelligence Coordinating Agency Alex Paul Monteagudo posted images online alleging Palabay’s connections with the underground Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army.

Just last month, Monteagudo earned the ire of Philippine Senators and the employees union of the Philippine Senate for his “malicious, baseless and dangerous” red-tagging activities of public sector unionists. The Subcommittee said it will take “additional measures” to mitigate risks Palabay and other resource persons face. “The personal safety and wellbeing of all those who appear before the Subcommittee are of the utmost concern to its members,” the Subcommittee said. It also called on the Canadian government to denounce the attacks, especially against human rights defenders such as Palabay. Read more - Lire plus



Matthew Behrens: The bloodied hands of the Canada-Israel drone warfare relationship
rabble.ca 28/05/2021 - In one of the most gut-wrenching scenes from decades of Israeli attacks against Gaza, four children playing on a beach were murdered in 2014 by an Israeli drone strike. Last December, Canada quietly purchased from Israeli war manufacturer Elbit Systems a $36-million, next-generation version of the drones implicated in that notorious murder. The Hermes 900 drone that Canada is purchasing is a larger and more advanced version of the Hermes 450, an aerial attack and surveillance drone that was notoriously used by the Israeli army to deliberately target civilians in Gaza during Israel's 2008-2009 onslaught, according to Human Rights Watch. Such Israeli drones have been in continuous use over Gaza, both surveilling the people below and then bombing them ever since.

There has been increased focus on the growing Canadian relationship with Israel's drone warfare industry over the past month, as the Israeli military -- which ranks No. 20 in the Global Firepower Index and possesses at least 90 nuclear weapons -- pulverized Gaza with a relentless 11-day terror bombardment that targeted medical facilities, schools, roads, housing complexes, and electrical systems. The Elbit Systems Hermes drone that Canada purchased was widely advertised as "combat proven" against the Palestinian people in Gaza in 2014, when 37 per cent of Palestinian casualties were linked to drone strikes. At that time, Amnesty International condemned Israeli forces for the commission of war crimes in what was then their third military offensive against Gaza in less than six years. Amnesty also called out Hamas for activities that they said amounted to war crimes as well.

Palestinians have long served as human targets for the lethal testing of Israeli war equipment. As the Israeli army's "technology and logistics" division head Avner Benzaken told Der Spiegel shortly after the murder of 2,100 Palestinians in 2014:
"If I develop a product and want to test it in the field, I only have to go five or 10 kilometres from my base and I can look and see what is happening with the equipment. I get feedback, so it makes the development process faster and much more efficient." Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East have been urging Transport Minister and Liberal MP Omar Alghabra to cancel the Elbit drone contract, demanding to know why Canada would be enriching the bottom line of a company so clearly complicit in the murder of Palestinians and the devastation of Gaza. [...]

While Elbit's Canadian subsidiary, GeoSpectrum Technologies, certainly works on drone warfare components from its offices in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, the longtime leader of Canada's drone warfare pack is Burlington, Ontario's L-3 Wescam (whose drone products have been frequently implicated in the commission of war crimes, as documented by Homes not Bombs and, more recently, by Project Ploughshares). At the same time, L-3 Wescam is also a key player in a lesser-known joint Canadian-Israeli effort to reap the rewards of up to $5 billion in planned armed drone purchases for Canada's war department. "Team Artemis" is a partnership between L3 MAS (a Mirabel subsidiary of L3Harris Technologies, which also owns drone targeting equipment manufacturer L-3 Wescam) and Israel Aerospace Industries. It is proposing what they call a Canadian version of the Israeli Heron TP drone. The Heron saw significant use during Operation Cast Lead against Gaza in 2008–2009, another grouping of war crimes that resulted in the murder of over 1,400 Palestinians. Canada subsequently leased the "combat-proven" drones for use in Afghanistan in 2009. [...]

While Canada crows about the use of drones for civilian purposes, this drone comes prepared with a "standard NATO BRU rack capable of holding multiple payloads," a euphemism for the rack that holds up to 2,200 pounds of bombs. [...] To remain silent in this time is a betrayal of those whose bloodshed is produced by these drones, the majority of whom live in Gaza and the majority of whom are children. [...] As the people of Gaza look warily on the latest ceasefire and worry about the next round of attacks -- what the Israeli military refers to as "mowing the grass" -- ­­people in this country can demand an end to all Canadian weapons exports to Israel, insist on the cancellation of the Elbit Systems drone purchase, and shut down any consideration of building a weaponized drone force for the Canadian military. In advance of a national day of action being organized by Homes not Bombs, those opposed to the Israeli Elbit drone purchase can generate an email with the handy online tool provided by Canadians for Peace and Justice in the Middle East. Read more - Lire plus

Israeli forces are attempting to reassert their control over Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem by arresting them
Al Jazeera 01/06/2021 - Hundreds of Palestinians have been arrested over the past month and a half in occupied East Jerusalem, in what lawyers said was a direct response to the Israeli police force losing its standing.

The escalation, which began after Israeli security forces banned Palestinians from accessing the Damascus Gate area, has spread to include violent Israeli repression of sit-ins in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, a “Death to Arabs” march by Israeli settlers, several mass incursions into Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, a deadly 11-day Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip, mob attacks on Palestinian citizens of Israel, and a widespread arrest campaign that has targeted at least 2,000 Palestinians within Jerusalem and the occupied territories.

Many of the arrests carried out in occupied East Jerusalem are based on what Palestinians published on their social media, particularly videos where they ridicule Israeli forces. According to lawyer Nasser Odeh, pursuing Palestinians because of what they post on their social media accounts is not new. “We’ve seen it in 2015-2016 during the Abu Khdeir flare-up,” Odeh told Al Jazeera, referring to the outbreak of protests and escalations the city witnessed following the 2015 murder and burning alive of Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir by Israeli settlers.

“After the Israeli government expanded its anti-terrorism law in 2016, that gave Israeli forces more power to arrest Palestinians on the back of their social media posts, alleging ‘incitement’ or even ‘association with a terrorist group’.” Currently, this practice has intensified – and based on his experience with such cases in 2015-2016, some of which had stretched out for years after – Odeh is wary that the arrests will only increase. “I guarantee you that in the next six to eight months, the number of arrests will double if not triple,” he said. Read more - Lire plus



State of Power 2021: The 9/11 complex: The political economy of counter-terrorism
TNI 05/2021 - The Cold War’s victorious side needed mechanisms for both maintaining a global hierarchy of states, while containing the human fallout within the South. The frameworks of ‘national security’ and ‘countering terrorism’ helped serve this role. They facilitated the construction of international security apparatuses to consolidate state power, principally in the North as well as the creation of transnational policing arrangements to monitor and manage their respective populations. In Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, this process took the form of a war on the rights of asylum seekers and migrants that would lead eventually into a domestic war against ‘Islamist terrorism’ under the ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT) in the wake of September 11, 2001. The figure of the ‘Third World’ asylum seeker blurred almost seamlessly into that of the ‘terrorist’, and the police powers for monitoring and controlling both largely overlapped. [...]

Recent organising to defund and/or abolish the militarised police has been a very welcome development, but with few exceptions, it has yet to tackle the question of ‘counter-terror’ policing. This is despite the growth of modern ‘counter-terror’ policing and surveillance being a key means through which coercive state powers have been transformed – indeed, the way through which what remains of the welfare state has been remade into the security state. Part of the difficulty in tackling counter-terrorism policies is that resistance has often remained in the legal realm – presenting them as discrete violations of rights or protocols to be combated through the courts – or that opposition extends merely insofar as policies are racist and/or Islamophobic. Neither approaches are without merit, but neither is sufficient. Connecting counter-terrorism to the question of policing at large is a vital step in advancing struggles against police and state violence. It compels us to broaden our understanding of policing, into a space where the boundaries between society and security grow hazy. It also forces us to confront the limits of anti-state violence strategies rooted in frameworks of legalism or moralism that fail to address either the politics or the underlying political economy of counter-terrorism.

‘Counter-terrorism’ is a set of policies, an ideology, a political project and, increasingly, an industry. It has been generated by the dynamics among states within the global system; through the machinations of different political parties in governments and their respective agendas; and through an expanding network of operators and power blocs seeking to find a niche within the security industry. This essay traces the development of the modern security state in Britain, maps the political economy of counter-terrorism and offers possibilities for organising strategies against counter-terror and security policies. Read more - Lire plus
State Power 2021: From Xinjiang to Mississippi: Terror Capitalism, Labour and Surveillance
TNI 05/2021 - ‘Where is your ID!’ the police contractor yelled at me in Uyghur. I looked up in surprise. I had been avoiding eye contact, trying to attract as little attention as possible. In April 2018, in the tourist areas of Kashgar – where there were checkpoints every 200 metres – the contractors usually recognised a bespectacled white person as a foreigner. But over the years that I had lived and worked as an anthropologist in Northwest China I had often been mistaken for a Uyghur. ‘I don’t have a local ID. I’m a foreigner. I only have a passport’, I responded in Mandarin. At another checkpoint, a Uyghur police contractor had advised me to stop speaking Uyghur if I didn’t want to raise suspicion. So, I had adopted the tactic of only speaking or writing Chinese at checkpoints.

‘Oh! Well show me your passport then’, he said, switching to Mandarin, his tones nearly as flat and imprecise as my own. He leafed through my passport, pausing at my picture. ‘That’s a big beard’, he commented. ‘That’s the style of a lot of young people in my hometown in the United States’, I responded. Other police contractors had also given me trouble at checkpoints because of the beard, which, for men under the age of 55, in 2014 state authorities had identified as a possible sign of religious extremism. I had watched them scan my passport photo and run it through an image-recognition system looking for matches with individuals on the watchlist. The beards that usually populated the screen looked as though the men might be from Afghanistan or Pakistan, though sometimes they looked like pictures of me. He didn’t seem convinced.

Wait here’, he said. I stood there for nearly an hour, becoming increasingly worried. I did not like the idea of the police seizing my passport and holding it for such a long time. As I waited I saw dozens of young Uyghurs line up, waiting to hand over their IDs and phones for inspection. I peered over their shoulders trying to see the app that the police contractors were looking for after the smartphone owners told them their access code. I couldn’t quite tell if the app was made by the digital forensics companies Meiya Pico or FiberHome. Both companies were working in the region to turn smartphones into devices that tracked movement and communication. Eventually a Han man, a ‘real’ police officer who carried a gun, showed up. He asked me about my background, why I was travelling, how I learned Chinese. He said they had looked me up in the system, so they knew all about me. I thought about the hundreds of Uyghurs I had interviewed since 2011. Some had already disappeared into the camp system, but most of my closest Uyghur and Kazakh friends had not yet been detained. I thought about the images of checkpoints, camera systems, signs and technical equipment that I had not yet uploaded to the cloud. The pages of notes on disappearances they might find hidden behind firewalls on my laptop. How they would force me to give them my email passwords. I imagined being shackled and thrown into a crowded concrete cell, forced to sign a false confession saying I was secretly working for the US intelligence agency, that anthropology was just a front, and that my real mission was to incite Uyghur terrorism.

‘Stand here’, he pointed to the back of a nearby taxi. He pulled out his smartphone and took a picture of me next to the license plate. Then he told me to hold my passport open and he took a close up of me next to it. ‘Get in’, he said. He turned to the Uyghur taxi driver and, switching to thickly accented Uyghur, said, ‘take him back to his hotel. Don’t go anywhere else. We are watching this car’. I was allowed to leave. Unlike so many people I knew I was not held in a camp or assigned a low-wage factory job. My data had been harvested, but I had the protection of my US passport to prevent my property and labour from being expropriated – or legally stolen. In a general sense, as a fact of life in a system of global capitalism, I was implicated in the system of control and ‘re-education’ I was studying. The digitisation of social life, the Global War on Terror, and the drive for low-cost commodities, is a fact of life almost everywhere. But as a protected citizen the fear I felt was a momentary glimpse of the terror that dominated the Uyghurs I saw at the checkpoints. For them, there was no way out. Read more - Lire plus

State of Power 2021: Arun Kundnani: Abolish national security
TNI 05/2021 - While the COVID-19 pandemic raged in 2020, at least 15 million people participated in Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations across the US. These multi-racial protests represented a coming to terms with the country’s history of racial violence. Among the predominantly young people protesting, there is a widespread awareness that war, prisons, and borders do not advance the well-being of the majority of people in the US, that turning the country into an ‘armed lifeboat’ is no solution to climate crisis and zoonotic pandemics, and that wealth never ‘trickles down’ to the majority under racial capitalism. Those who have come of age in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008/9 are not being taken in by the false image of an exceptionally virtuous US.

As with any movement, within it there is a diverse range of motivations and orientations. Of particular note is the abolitionist approach that has shaped much recent Black-led mass struggle, influenced by Black feminist politics and queer organising – and the radical notions of care these traditions embody. Abolitionism is a mode of political thinking and practice that has emerged from 20 years of organising against the prison–industrial complex by groups such as Critical Resistance. Abolishing prisons and defunding the police are its most prominent aims but opposition to border violence and militarism has also been important. Abolitionism locates policing and incarceration within a broader set of structures that includes borders and military violence deployed abroad. Fifteen years ago, one of the leading thinkers on abolitionism, Angela Davis, called for anti-prisons organising work to expand to take on the global imprisonment networks of the ‘Global War on Terror’. Today, groups such as Dissenters are organising against the entirety of the US’s national security infrastructure from a Black abolitionist perspective. [...]

The work of imagining alternatives to the criminal-legal system is ongoing. What is striking, however, is the generative possibilities of applying an abolitionist approach not only domestically within the US but also to its agencies of global security. In this, abolitionism draws upon the legacies of a Black internationalist politics in the US that found expression, for example, in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s organising in the late 1960s against the Vietnam war and its work supporting national liberation in Puerto Rico and Palestine. Like its criminal-legal system, the US’s global national security infrastructure spreads rather than reduces violence, in ways that are often organised through racism. And its military actions distract us from addressing the social and ecological problems the planet faces. Abolitionism implies that framing discussion of US military actions in terms of which kinds of ‘intervention’ are legitimate and which are not is a limiting horizon that hides from view the structural drivers of endless war. Likewise, discussing who should be constrained by borders and who should not means avoiding reflection on the role that borders play in our social and economic systems and what the alternatives might be.

An abolitionist framework entails understanding that genuine security does not result from the elimination of ‘threats’ but from the presence of collective well-being. It advocates building institutions that foster the social and ecological relationships needed to live dignified lives, rather than reactively identifying groups of people who are seen as threatening. It holds that true security rests not on dominance but on solidarity, at both the personal and the international level. It is possible to address security problems like climate change and pandemic diseases only from an internationalist perspective. In the long term, it is illusory to achieve security for one group of people at another’s expense. In policy terms, an abolitionist approach would imply a progressive defunding and shrinking of the US’s bloated military, intelligence, and border infrastructure, and the construction of alternative institutions that can provide collective security in the face of environmental and social dangers. Read more - Lire plus

Torture Evidence and the Guantanamo Military Commissions
Just Security 26/05/2021 - “Torture evidence” can mean two things: evidence about torture, and evidence obtained through torture. In a decent legal system, the first kind is admissible and the second decidedly is not. Then there are the Guantánamo Military Commissions. Last week, Carol Rosenberg reported that defense counsel and the Commissions’ convening authority have reached an agreement about convicted Al Qaeda courier Majid Khan, apparently to head off the need for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers to testify about his torture in his sentencing proceeding.

The jury will be instructed to impose a sentence of 25 to 40 years; but under the new agreement the judge will reduce it to 11 to 14 years (including time served). The military judge, Army Colonel Douglas K. Watkins, already lopped off an additional year because of prosecutorial misconduct. The result is that Mr. Khan could be released as early as next year, depending on the extent of his cooperation. Plainly this is as good an outcome as he could hope for. The kicker is this: The agreement requires the defense to request vacatur of a landmark decision by Judge Watkins. That decision (more about it below) granted Mr. Khan sentencing credit on account of his torture, if it was proven. Judge Watkins also granted the defense motion to take evidence, including from CIA personnel involved in his abuse. Now, his ruling will be vacated. Apparently, the government thinks it is of the utmost importance not just to bury evidence of CIA torture, but to ensure a decision that could have allowed other detainees to expose their abuse is erased from the books.

A few days after the news of the Majid Khan agreement, another military judge, Army Col. Lanny Acosta, Jr., allowed prosecutors in the case of accused USS Cole bomber Abd-al-Rahim al-Nashiri to introduce a document containing statements that the defense said were “obtained by torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” (CIDT). Judge Acosta’s decision found that the law barring such statements applies only to evidence at trial, not to their use in interlocutory matters. Coming back-to-back, these two developments are the most recent confirmation of something that Guantánamo-watchers have long understood: The government will go to any lengths to bury the truth about CIA torture, at the same time that it presses to use the fruits of that peculiarly noxious tree. At Guantánamo, it seems, evidence about torture is out; statements obtained by torture are in, through the back door of non-trial proceedings.

A third legal event of last week took place an ocean away from Guantánamo, in The Hague. The day before Judge Acosta’s decision, an International Criminal Court (ICC) Trial Chamber admitted into evidence statements by the accused that were given while he was in the custody of security forces that allegedly tortured him. The parallel with Guantánamo is unmistakable and unfortunate – the sign of prosecutors desperate for convictions, and judges too willing to give them latitude to traffic in torture evidence. Read more - Lire plus



Video: One Man's No-Fly List Nightmare
The Intercept 30/05/2021 - As his plane touched down on the tarmac at Karachi International Airport in August 2020, Ashraf Maniar finally felt himself relax. After a harrowing 24 hours of travel, beginning from the United States, connecting in Turkey, and on to his final destination in Pakistan, he felt like he was on the threshold of resuming a normal life. For years, Maniar, a 30-year-old U.S. citizen born and raised in California, had been living a life gripped by fear and paranoia. A friendship he had cultivated years earlier with a young woman in the United Kingdom, who was later accused of extremism, had brought him to the attention of security officials in the U.S., resulting in years of harassment, though never any charges against him.

Worst of all, during the years Maniar had been living under government suspicion, he had been unable to continue his normal lifestyle of frequent travel. After several failed attempts to board flights, where he sometimes found himself met by FBI agents at the airport who prevented him from boarding, his lawyers had undertaken a lengthy administrative process with the Department of Homeland Security and determined that he had been placed on the government’s secretive no-fly list. They launched a legal effort to clear his name and get him removed, which took several more years of fighting against an opaque system set up by Homeland Security to clandestinely blacklist suspected terrorists.
After years of stress, Maniar’s problems now seemed to be resolved. Packed along with his passport and travel documents, Maniar had a one-page document that signified his freedom: an official letter from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security confirming that he had been taken off the no-fly list and was not considered a danger to travel. [...]

Two of the men roughly placed Maniar down on a chair in the center room and handcuffed him with his arms in front. One of the agents asked why he was visiting Pakistan and what he knew about the war in Syria. In thickly accented English, the agent said if Maniar didn’t truthfully tell them everything they wanted to know, “this is not going to be easy for you.” “At this point, in my mind, I was like, dude, I’m done. I don’t know what’s going on, but I know the ISI is a big deal,” Maniar said. “I was thinking I’m never seeing my family again. I’m either going to be dead, or they’re about to set me up for something.” Maniar said that he didn’t have anything to tell them. Frantically scanning his mind for something that could explain his situation to the ISI agents and get him out of this, he went back to the no-fly list letter. That one-page document, issued under the letterhead of the Department of Homeland Security, permitting him to fly and clearing his name of suspicions of terrorism back home, had been his ticket out of the nightmare of law enforcement harassment he’d been experiencing for years. But somehow the message that he wasn’t a threat hadn’t been communicated abroad. Maniar tried with increasing desperation to explain the letter and how he had resolved his issues in the United States. As he was speaking, a black bag came down over his head. [...]

In 2014, a major investigation based on leaked documents was published by The Intercept shedding light on how the terrorist watchlist was constructed. A 166-page document titled “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance,” exposed a covert program that blacklisted large numbers of people based on unchallengeable secret criteria. The watchlisting guidance revealed the levels of “derogatory information” that could lead to someone winding up on the list, exposing an opaque system with few checks and balances that was ripe for abuse. It was easy to get yourself on the list and suffer its consequences, but very difficult to know how to clear your name if you were actually innocent. Over the years, several lawsuits were filed by individuals seeking to challenge their inclusion on the list. After being subjected to repeated detention by U.S. customs officials after traveling abroad, a U.S. citizen named Anas Elhady, along with two dozen other plaintiffs, filed a lawsuit over the watchlisting program in 2016. A federal judge ruled in 2019 that the watchlisting program was unconstitutional.

In March, the U.S. government successfully appealed that ruling, leaving the watchlisting system in place for now. But court documents from the Elhady case revealed some important details about the secretive program. In a statement of facts related to the case, the U.S. government disclosed that in June 2017 approximately 1.2 million people were included on the watchlist, of whom roughly 4,600 were U.S. citizens or permanent residents. The same filing also helped demonstrate how the list can go global: “TSDB data is also shared with more than sixty foreign governments.” Despite years of efforts by civil liberties lawyers and journalists, much about the watchlisting program remains unknown, including how information used to construct the list might be used by foreign governments. Read more - Lire plus
Loi antiterroriste : l'Assemblée nationale entérine les mesures et suscite l'émoi chez l'opposition
RT France 02/06/2021 - Malgré les réserves du Conseil d'Etat sur certains points, l'Assemblée nationale a voté le 1er juin le projet de loi antiterroriste et renseignement. Des débats virulents sur les libertés publiques ont opposé majorité et opposition. Le 1er juin au soir à l'occasion de l'examen en première lecture de son projet de nouvelle loi antiterroriste et renseignement, l'Assemblée nationale a pérennisé dans le droit commun des mesures inspirées de l'état d'urgence que le Parlement avait choisi d'expérimenter depuis 2017. Le lendemain, le palais Bourbon a adopté le texte en première lecture par 87 voix pour, 10 contre et 4 abstentions. Il doit désormais aller au Sénat.

Il s'agit des quatre mesures emblématiques de la loi Sécurité intérieure et lutte contre le terrorisme (Silt) contestée par des défenseurs des libertés publiques et par une large partie de la gauche de l'hémicycle. Périmètres de sécurité, fermeture de lieux de culte, mesures individuelles de contrôle administratif et de surveillance (Micas) et visites domiciliaires, héritières pour ces deux dernières des assignations à résidence et des perquisitions administratives : ces quatre dispositions de police administrative avaient pris la suite de mesures de l'état d'urgence mise en œuvre pendant les deux années qui ont suivi les sanglants attentats de Paris et Saint-Denis le 13 novembre 2015. La gauche, LFI, des députés communistes et écologistes ont sans succès réclamé la suppression de ces dispositions. Read more - Lire plus

Mental health tests in the presence of counter-terror units ‘unethical’, says charity
The Guardian 19/05/2021 - Mental health assessments are being conducted in the presence of police in little-known hubs that embed nurses and psychologists with counter-terrorism units, raising “serious ethical concerns”, a medical charity has said. The so-called “vulnerability support hubs” have become a permanent feature of the UK counter-terrorism apparatus since they were introduced to trial a national “vulnerability support service” in 2016 and are now established in three regions – the north, Midlands and south. Thousands of individuals suspected of potential extremism, most of whom have been referred to the government’s counter-terrorism programme Prevent, have been assessed by the hubs, which see consultant psychiatrists, consultant psychologists and mental health nurses work alongside counter-terror police.

major study by the charity Medact has concluded that the focus of the project is for the benefit of counter-terrorism policing rather than the patients, which puts the embedded mental health professionals at risk of compromising medical ethics. The hubs should be scrapped, said Medact, which researches and campaigns on the social, political and economic factors that affect health inequalities. The charity said it uncovered details of the operations in unpublished evaluations of the project pilot. As well as discovering that police officers had sat in on mental health assessments, Medact said it had found that those referred to the hubs were detained under the Mental Health Act in cases where police appear to be applying pressure on health professionals. In one case study in the report, the charity said, police escalated concerns about a patient in order to “secure admission and prevent discharge” on the basis of “unacceptable unknown” information. Other case studies also show that medical professionals are encouraged to monitor patient medication regime compliance on the basis of concerns such as “acting in an odd manner” or being a “convert to Islam”, Medact said. Thousands of individuals have been referred to the programme, a large proportion being young people including teenagers and children as young as six, the report added. Read more - Lire plus
European Court of Human Rights: Bulk communications data interception by UK and Swedish spy agencies violated right to privacy
statewatch 26/05/2021 - An eight-year legal challenge initiated following the Snowden revelations in 2013 ended yesterday, when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the surveillance regime governing "bulk interception" of communications data by British spy agency GCHQ violated the right to privacy.

GCHQ’s mass data interception violated right to privacy, court rules (The Guardian, link): "The UK spy agency GCHQ’s methods for bulk interception of online communications violated the right to privacy and the regime for collection of data was unlawful, the grand chamber of the European court of human rights has ruled. In what was described as a “landmark victory” by Liberty, one of the applicants, the judges also found the bulk interception regime breached the right to freedom of expression and contained insufficient protections for confidential journalistic material but said the decision to operate a bulk interception regime did not of itself violate the European convention on human rights.

The chamber, the ultimate court of the ECHR, also concluded that GCHQ’s regime for sharing sensitive digital intelligence with foreign governments was not illegal." Privacy International (one of the organisations that brought the case) note in their analysis of the judgment that the ECHR's failure to rule that bulk surveillance in itself is illegal means "in principle, it would be acceptable for a government to spy on its people on a mass scale, as long as there were oversight mechanisms and safeguards in place."

However, it should be noted that not all of the judges at the court were in agreement, as highlighted by The Guardian: "One of the partially dissenting judges, Paulo Pinto de Albuquerque said the ruling had opened the gates for an electronic 'Big Brother' in Europe. Four other judges also partially dissented from the majority opinion, disagreeing with the finding that the regime for sharing sensitive digital intelligence with foreign governments was not illegal. Three of the dissenting judges quoted from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: 'There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.'" Furthermore, the legal regime that was the subject of the complaint is no longer in force, having been replaced by the controversial Investigatory Powers Act 2016. That law is currently being challenged by Liberty. On the same day as its judgment on the UK's bulk interception regime, the ECHR published a judgment finding that there were also insufficient safeguards in place for the Swedish system of bulk telecoms data interception. Read more - Lire plus
ACTIONS & EVENTS
NEW International Action: Canada must take action to end the injustice against Dr Hassan Diab
Despite no new evidence, strong exculpatory evidence, and contradictory reasoning, France's highest court, the Cour de Cassation, has upheld the French Court of Appeal's shocking order that Hassan must stand trial.

Send the message below to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as well as the Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister of Justice, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs: The Canadian government must take immediate action to put an end to Dr. Diab's long odyssey of injustice!

NEW If you live outside of Canada, take action here

Please share on Facebook + Twitter + Instagram

NOUVEAU Si vous n'habitez pas au Canada, agissez ici

Partagez sur Facebook + Twitter + Instagram
Join the Transnational Institute for the 10 year anniversary of State of Power with this digital gathering and conversation with authors for this years special edition: Coercive World. The webinar will explore the reasons for the hegemonic rise of militarised and security-based responses by states and outline visions, ideas and strategies for confronting and ending repressive state power. Register here. Facebook event.

Speakers:
* Arun Kundnani, writer on race, culture, empire & author of "The Muslims are Coming"
* Olufemi Taiwo, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University
* Nikita Sovanane, Criminal Justice and Police Accountability Project, India
* Felipe Daza, Observatory on Corporations and Human Rights in the Mediterranean
Save Abdo from deportation
Abdelrahman El Mady is a father, a husband, a human rights activist and a refugee. He escaped persecution in his home country of Egypt, hoping to find safety in Canada.

Instead he faced profiling and Islamophobia at the hands of the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA). The CBSA has deemed him inadmissible and is now trying to deport him to Egypt.

The Canadian government must hold the CBSA accountable, offer Abdo protection from the risks of detention and torture in Egypt, and reunite him with his wife and children in Canada.
NEW Tell PM Trudeau: No New Fighter Jets!
The Canadian government has launched a competition for 88 new fighter jets, for a starting price of $19 billion (and a cost of at least $77B over the lifespan of the jets). This is the second most expensive procurement in Canadian history.

This purchase is planned for early 2022. It's crucial that the government hears from all of us, now!

Send a letter to Prime Minister Trudeau, National Defence Minister Sajjan, Foreign Affairs Minister Champagne, and all Members of Parliament.

Tell Trudeau to sanction Israel
Right now, Gaza is under attack, and Jerusalem is being ethnically cleansed right before our eyes.

Help us ramp up the pressure on the Trudeau government to stop Israeli aggression and war crimes.

Send an email to Trudeau now demanding that the Canadian government forcefully condemn Israel’s actions and follow its words up with consequences, including sanctions.
New action to help free Cihan Erdal
CUPE member Cihan Erdal has been unjustly jailed for six months in Turkey. CUPE National has sent a letter to Canadian foreign affairs minister with three specific demands for action and reiterating CUPE’s call last fall for Canada to work on Cihan’s behalf. You can help by reminding the Ankara Prosecutor, Turkish Minister of Justice and the President of Turkey of their country's human rights obligations and encourage them to release Cihan and to allow him to return home.

Protect our rights from facial recognition!
ICLMG - Facial recognition surveillance is invasive and inaccurate. This unregulated tech poses a threat to the fundamental rights of people across Canada.

Federal intelligence agencies refuse to disclose whether they use facial recognition technology. The RCMP has admitted (after lying about it) to using facial recognition for 18 years without regulation, let alone a public debate regarding whether it should have been allowed in the first place.

Send a message to Prime Minister Trudeau and Public Safety Minister Bill Blair calling for a ban now.
CSIS is NOT above the law!
Two recent court decisions revealed the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) engaged in potentially illegal activities and lied to the courts. This is unacceptable, especially given that this is not the first time these serious problems have been raised. CSIS cannot be allowed to act as though they are above the law.

Send a message to the Public Safety Minister demanding that he take action to put an end to this abuse of power and hold those CSIS officers involved accountable. Your message will also be sent to your MP and to Minister of Justice David Lametti.
Call on Justin Trudeau to ensure justice for Abousfian Abdelrazik
In September 2003, Canadian citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik was arrested in Sudan, while he was back in the country visiting his ailing mother. Over the next three years he was imprisoned for nearly 20 months and was held under house arrest for 12 months. He was denied a lawyer, and was never charged or brought before a judge. During that time he was badly tortured in three different prisons. Not only did Canada fail to take steps to protect him, CSIS officials frequently obstructed efforts to secure his release.
Tell Transport Minister to cancel Canada's drone contract now!
Canada’s Transportation Ministry recently approved a $36M contract for drone technology from Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons company. The money will purchase a “civilian” version of Elbit’s lethal military drone, the same one which was used to kill civilians during Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2014.
Click below to message the Transport Minister, the Prime Minister, federal political leaders, and your MP.
Stop CSIS from targeting everyday citizens & community groups
A recent report revealed that CSIS, Canada’s spy agency, collected over 8,000 pages of documents, spying on citizens like you, people who exercise their democratic rights by attending a community meeting at a local church or taking peaceful action for what they believe in. And CSIS shared this info with Big Oil corporations. Sign this petition to tell the govt to stop using taxpayer money to unconstitutionally spy on Canadians part of peaceful community groups.
All-in-one action page: Stop Mohamed Harkat's Deportation to Torture
Call PM Trudeau, write a letter to Public Safety Minister & your MP, and sign Sophie Harkat's petition to stop the deportation of Moe Harkat.

If sent back to Algeria, Moe faces detention, torture and death.

No one should be deported to torture. Ever.
Reunite Ayub, Khalil, and Salahidin with their families
Ayub Mohammed, Salahidin Abdulahad, and Khalil Mamut are 3 Uyghur men who fled China's persecution. They were sold by bounty hunters to the US military in 2001 and taken with 19 other Uyghurs to Guantanamo.

Despite being exonerated in 2003, they were kept in Guantanamo for years. Now in forced exile, their families are here in Canada, and their kids growing up without their fathers.

Despite posing no threat to Canadian national security, these men have been waiting over 5 years to reunite with their families.

Take action to reunite them!
Call on China to allow reunion of Uyghur families
Many Uyghur parents overseas have had to leave one or more children in the care of family members in Xinjiang. Some parents have since learned their children were taken to state-run “orphan camps” or boarding schools after the relatives taking care of them had been detained.
The mass detention campaign in Xinjiang has prevented Uyghur parents from returning to China to take care of their children themselves.

Sign the petition and call on China's President to ensure that children are allowed to leave China to be reunited as promptly as possible with their parents and siblings already living abroad, if that is preferred by them.
China: Free Canadian Huseyin Celil
The Chinese authorities accused Huseyin of offences related to his activities in support of Uighur rights. They held Huseyin in a secret place. They gave him no access to a lawyer, to his family, or to Canadian officials. They threatened him and forced him to sign a confession. They refused to recognize Huseyin’s status as a Canadian citizen, and they did not allow Canadian officials to attend his trial. It was not conducted fairly, and resulted in a sentence of life in prison in China. His life sentence was reduced to 20 years in February 2016. Huseyin has spent much of his time in solitary confinement. He lacks healthy food and is in poor health. Kamila needs her husband, and the boys need their father back.
Canada must act to end Islamophobia in Xinjiang, China
There is credible evidence that up to one million Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other mainly Muslim groups in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are being detained in secret internment camps. Detainees are brainwashed, tortured and are forced to renounce their religion and culture.


And send a message to Chrystia Freeland demanding that Canada actively support an independent and unrestricted international fact-finding initiative to Xinjiang.

Protect Encryption in Canada
Our ability to use the Internet safely, securely and privately is under threat. Canada wants to create 'back doors' into encryption like some of our partner countries in the Five Eyes Alliance have already done.

This weakens Internet safety for all of us. If we don’t act, Canada could be next.

We need a policy that explicitly protects our right to encryption now.
Environmental defenders are not terrorists!
We, the undersigned environmental and climate activists from the Philippines and the international community, urge Filipino public authorities to undertake preventive interventions against the continued red-tagging and the possible escalation of reprisals against environmental defenders.

We urge legislators to declare red-tagging as a crime punishable by law for curtailing constitutionally-guaranteed free speech and other civil liberties.
Defund the police & the RCMP
More and more people are calling on their city councils to reduce and eliminate budgets for policing. We are no longer going to pay for police to harm our communities. These funds can be re-directed to support the recovery and provide much need improvements to public housing, transit, and food security programs among other basic needs. Please use this e-mail tool to tell your City Councillor to act now to defund the police in your communities. Together we keep each other safe.


Your phone is not safe at the border
Canada’s border agents can search your phone and laptop at borders and airports, including looking through your private photos, personal messages, and call history.

These ‘digital strip searches’ are allowed because our laws are incredibly out of date. But politicians are refusing to update them for our digital age.

Fight back with us: demand updated laws, learn more about your rights, and make a complaint if your privacy has been violated at the border.
MORE NEWS - AUTRES NOUVELLES
From July to December 2020
ICLMG - 2020 has been BUSY! Click below to see what we’ve accomplished in the second half of 2020, but first here is our plan for the next year.

In 2021, we will continue fighting:
  • against facial recognition technology, governments' attacks on encryption, and online mass surveillance
  • for a review mechanism for the Canada Border Services Agency
  • to abolish security certificates and end deportation to torture
  • to repeal of the Canadian No Fly List
  • for justice for Hassan Diab & the reform of the Extradition Act

and much more! Find out how you can help here and see what we did in 2020 below:


Les opinions exprimées ne reflètent pas nécessairement les positions de la CSILC - The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the positions of ICLMG.
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